Thread: Internal Fighting Techniques Article

Internal Fighting Techniques

By Emma .J. Pringle

Hard and Palm Strikes of the Internal Martial Arts



With internal martial arts a lot of extensive hand strikes have similarities to external martial arts. Hand strikes use the wrist and the ridge of the hand (the space between your thumb and index finger) the edge and palm of an open hand, also the front, back, inside and outside of a closed hand.



However, the three main internal styles (ba gua, tai chi, hsing-i) have their own specialised strikes. Each of the internal styles, however similar their fighting techniques are can differ a lot or a little compared to that of external form movements and explanations of two-person fighting tactics.



The explanation behind the reasons for such differences is found in the telling of how each style developed and showed the essence of a certain technique within its own philosophical and operational approaches.



The internal martial arts have become undoubtedly infamous throughout China because of the survival of ancient fighting techniques within the internal martial arts systems.



Ba gua – meaning “Eight Trigram Palm” – uses the palm more than the fist. As a main rule Ba gua uses the open hands, forearms and fingers to amazing effect. Out of the eight mother palms taught in this art only one of them is a fist. However, the most famous technique of Ma Wei Chi was a spherical punch.



Tai Chi tends to mould both open-hand and close-fist tactics evenly. Hsing-I splits to use closed fist techniques in its primary Five Elements applications and open hand techniques with its animal forms.



There are a number of different ways to strike an opponent in internal martial arts styles. The first thing to take notice of is a beginner who lacks control will usually hit an opponent as hard as possible.



At a more advanced level you have the power of choice to seriously injure your opponent or restrain them. If your decision is against inflicting injury then you may choose to use ja jin techniques which is where your power passes through the person you hit. Your Fa jin will definitely move your opponent in physical space, but will also cause no serious injury or harm.



Sometimes, however, it is necessary to use force and your only option is to harm someone, the Fa jin can be focused inside the person attacking you so that your power doesn’t leave their body, this in turn causes internal injuries such as haemorrhaging and other impact injuries.



The earlier masters of internal martial arts could hit the outside of a person’s body leaving no physical imprint. In turn that person could subsequently die from the shockwaves of the hit creating internal injuries.



This technique of being able to concentrate force onto varying internal areas is amazing.



The idea of internal martial arts is very much akin to that of the technology to those tank artillery shells that combat the energy of the tank crew but leave the body of the enemy tank unharmed.



The turning of the soft tissue combined with the immediate opening of the body’s joints and cavities to discharge chi energy from a certain point in the body are the technical, physical ways by which sudden Fa jin release can be achieved.



In China a lot of people think of internal martial arts to be much more powerful then external martial arts, this is because it has been proven effective even when strikes occur but no contact is made on an opponent, this power is believed to be “chi” energy and people think that it is supernatural and must be more powerful than an external martial arts because hits can be inflicted without even achieving contact.



The martial effectiveness of the internal martial arts is by no means supernatural but instead counts on very intricate and extremely sophisticated body and chi mechanisms. The difference between external and internal martial arts is that external styles focus on fighting technique and the core focus of internal styles is to develop internal power also known as chi. A beginner’s movements in an internal martial arts style like Kung Fu may appear to be un-subtle.



As an internal martial arts practitioner becomes more integrated in training, it then becomes less and less obvious to an observer to see what is being done externally. E.g. because I’ve been doing dressage for years when I’m riding and my horse isn’t co-operating by fighting me with her internal energy it is undetectable to spectators but I can feel this and know how to counter her energy using my own so as I have progressed I’ve learned to ride internally and not using external power in the reins or in my legs, being able to ride in harmony with my horse making training more enjoyable for myself and my horse.



The feeling that the power displayed is supernatural is just not correct; you simply cannot view the internal mechanisms being used. However, having said that, at high levels of chi development internal arts can, indeed, portray to others to be a little un-worldly.



This phenomenon only happens when you do not use physical power any longer, but alternatively draw solely on chi energy. Today very few people have achieved this level, but it is how I have been taught to horse ride and when you can feel the internal energy of such a powerful animal moulded by your own internal energy you really begin to understand how to develop this energy for self preservation in the martial arts.





Types of Strikes and Hand Actions



Tai Chi has the biggest number of adherents in China and the West although with this in mind, all its range of techniques is not usually taught. Instead the main focus areas for its students are the forms and push hands.



Ba gua and hsing-I schools have less adherents, but many more of the teachers both in China and the West focus on and teach their students the actual specific fighting techniques themselves, as well as the forms and Rou Shou/push hands training. As Ba gua has the biggest repertoire of fight techniques in the internal martial arts, I will first be referring to ba gua then to tai chi then hsing-I. Please keep in mind that ALL internal martial arts hand techniques that I write about and also the many more I do not mention, can be done when opening and issuing energy from your body as well as when you close and bring the energy back to yourself.





The Piercing Strike





The Piercing Strike will usually mean you learn to attack using your fingers, palms or the edges of your hands (as in the bui tze for Wing Tsun Kung Fu).



A straight line attack (which is in actual fact the result of an internal spiralling motivating force) is used to 1) penetrate the body of your opponent 2) elevate your opponent off their feet as you penetrate the body, limbs or head. 3) Dislocate your opponent’s joints of the arms or legs. 4) Knock away your opponent’s protecting or attacking arm. You can also, simultaneously, spear, hit with your palm or side out your opponent with either edge of your hand.



(The last move is a primary strike technique of Ba gua’s fighting Strategy System). You may also view this in a tai chi move known as “White Snake puts out its tongue” also in hsing-I called “water-element technique of chilling fist”.



Upward Curving Strike

This is a strike that you can carry out with your palms, fingers, wrist or elbows. The upward-curving strike is used in safe practice to allow the dispersal of energy into someone (that is, use Fa jin). This strike can lift individuals upwards or backwards without hurting them. If it is used with the intent to injure someone it can break bones, tear and haemorrhage the organs (especially if you use palms or elbows) it can also tear the muscles of the arms and legs from their insertion prints.



You can also see this technique in tai chi’s commencement (wrist), Fair lady weaves the shuttles (palms), lifting hand (fingers), white crane spreads its wings (elbows) and in the hsing-I fire – element pounding fist and the chicken, tiger and monkey forms.



Cutting Actions



Cutting actions are used both to shatter bone, as when chopping an am or the neck, or most usefully to cut like a knife.



The elbows are used to penetrate deeply into the tissue to the deeper layers of muscle causing severe damage. Cuts may be executed sideways, upwards, downwards or diagonally using the front or edge of the hand, the knuckles, the back of the wrist, tip of the elbow, the shoulder, the head, the knees or the feet.



Also cutting techniques can be used in many of the roll back tia chi movements, in the change between the end of “white crane spreads its wings” and the start of “brush knee and twist step” and in the downward chopping of hsing-i’s five elements splitting fist, the downward component of “pounding fist” and finally the snake, eagle and other bird animal forms.



Finger Strikes


The finger strikes are meant to be so damaging as to actually be able to penetrate flesh. They can give out a strong vibration or shaking at the point of impact, a raking or clawing motion, a wavelike striking and withdrawing action or a twisting, boring, drill-like action.



A person’s finger gung ju has to be 100% correct to hit the head of an opponent and be able to penetrate without damaging his/her own thrusting fingers. This type of finger thrusting training can be achieved by channelling chi to the fingers through the nei gung and circle-walking postures of ba gua and not by doing finger push-ups or hitting sand or other objects, as is trained by Shaolin students.



Finger strikes are also used to hi specific acupuncture points in specific ways and/or at certain times of the day to disrupt an opponent’s chi. This can be a lethal form of reverse acupuncture. (These strategic techniques are called dim mak in Cantonese and dian xue in Mandarin). The back hand of tai chi single whip and forward hand of brush knee and twist step especially more with finger techniques as so the monkey, snake, tiger and dragon animal forms of hsing-i.



Knuckle Strikes


The knuckle strikes are just as effective and similar to finger strikes, except when it comes to twisting soft tissue and striking bone. Fingers do more subtle, finer work to twist and grab opponents’ muscles also a person’s hands are quite strong.



The knuckles use the same physical movements and the same fin (power) which are usually safer for the attacker when carried out against bone.



In both tai chi and hsing-i, knuckle strikes are inherent in any punch.



Grabbing


Grabbing tactics are used to hold an attacker fast – like a wrestler would and throw them, also rip the skin of the body or twist the joints of the arms or legs into locks, causing extreme pain or breakage.



These fighting application tactics are demonstrated throughout chen style tai chi, pull down and the 131 split techniques within white crane spreads its wings – for example: in hsing-I these applications are used every time an open hand closes into a fist especially in the splitting fist.



Slaps


Slaps can be executed on an attacker with either stiff or loose hands, using either the front or back of the hand.

A hand used to slap, whether it’s stiff or soft can be used ultimately crush whatever it makes contact with, it can also send vibrations through an opponent’s body to damage internal tissue with a distance from the strike (for example, a slap applied to a shoulder joint may damage the liver, a slap to the top of the head may break the neck or a slap to the stomach may damage the spine). <o></o>



To break bones soft slaps may be applied (skull, ribs, sternum or knees). Soft slaps combined with applications that initiate that use of spiralling reversals of motion are ideal for damaging an attacker’s internal organs.



In ba gua’s Rau Shau, for purposes of safety, power penetration, slaps are avoided; whereas in actual combat power penetration is used to burst internal organs, slaps to the skull are applied to shake the brain against the walls of the skull causing unconsciousness, internal bleeding or death. These slaps are present in tai chi’s “Brush knee” and “twist step”, the downward movement roll back the transition between shoulder strike and white crane spreads its wings, also is present in the splitting fist of hsing-i, also in a lot of the little transition section of the hsing-i animal forms.

Hope makes sense Em,

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LEFT-RIGHT, FORWARD-BACK,

UP-DOWN REVERSALS


By Emma .J. Pringle




These reversed movements are based on the S-shaped movements found in the Yin Yang tai chi symbol, which combines ba gua’s turning and circling techniques.



In Ba gua they are clearly the most present, next more commonly is in Chen style tai chi (especially the throws) and then more commonly in the small-frame Yang with We tai chi, and least commonly in the large-frame methods of Yang style tai chi.


Reversal Strikes


The first attack gives you the first half of the S-shaped movement. This will make your opponent move in one direction with a great deal of force, so all of his power goes in one direction, may this be up, down, left, right, forwards or backwards or along one direction or the other I the line of a diagonal.



While your opponent travels in the direction of the strike you just executed, your body is then able to snake back and strike your opponent from another direction.



This reversal then amplifies the power from you first attack creating an effect much the same as to a head-on care collision. Your opponent’s speed and energy from your first attack then comes into contact with your second attack of the S-curve power, which is now travelling in the opposite direction. The collision effect is magnified by the kinetic force of your own weight and energy changing its course of direction.



The left-right reverse attacks are more commonly used for you to be able to strike the head, neck and ribs.



The up-down reverse attacks are used to give an opponent whiplash on the neck and spinal area then to strike the body on the way back up from your downward attack.



Your opponent’s body is usually by this stage so disorientated especially from the whiplash effect that another incoming blow cannot be shielded against or absorbed, creating disastrous results. If the neck and spine suffer whiplash your opponent cannot yield to the hit, this is the same effect as if you can imagine being pinned again a brick wall and repeatedly beaten. The only purpose of the forward-backward reversal attack is to break the neck or back of the opponent or to throw an attacker face first into the ground.



Reversal Throws


The idea behind throwing actions is similar to that of the same design invented for the S-curve hand strikes. The technique known as the vertical drop-to-the-ground application came from the tai chi/ba gua “snake creeps down” posture, this is a unique aspect of ba gua.



It is especially even more prevalent in the Cheng Ting Hua system of ba gua, this system of ba gua has the most developed throwing application techniques, among these techniques are as follows:



A) The vertical downward drop, followed with a left-right/forwaed-backward reversal, which are all completed with fast, smooth, co-ordinated motion.



B) The downward drop of the body (either physically, energetically or both) is co-ordinated with a simultaneous upward motion of the arms.



C) When your attacker’s body fails to reach the bottom of your torso, you then drop and reverse the process by directing your power upwards, causing his feet to fly upwards and his head or his body to fall with the power of your strike to the ground, this move is then further complicated because adding to your up and down body/chi move, your own body and/or feet maybe moving in any direction. The throws of ba gua depend heavily on its practitioners for the rapid opening and closing of the joints and body cavities also the opening and closing, bending and bowing of the spine.

Martial artists who have a good form in their throws should be able to mould their techniques quite easily into Cheng Ting Hua-style ba gua, and will find that ba gua’s throwing, striking and kicking techniques will be very good because they will compliment each other.



Martial artists who specialise in training with hitting and kicking should find that the throwing techniques of ba gua can be joined easily into a style that focuses on hitting.



Throws are an important part of training in the martial arts to achieve well refined fighting skills.



When fighting more than one person it can be very useful to know how to throw one attacker into another attacker which should block others from closing in on you.



This technique can be seen ask killing two birds with one stone, this attack can be especially effective if the attacker who you threw was on their feet, hit the other person’s head or knees. The S-curve reversals along with the turning footwork patterns of ba gua are the reason behind the “now you see it now you don’t” phenomena of ba gua techniques.



With practitioners of ba gua they seem to portray that they can appear and disappear at the most unpredictable times, this is down to the intricate footwork, fast waist turns and the short lapse of the opponent’s awareness in the middle of a directional reverse.



In tai chi, the S-curve applications are most prevalent in all threads of the chen style. They are however nowhere near as prevalent in large or medium frame tai chi as they are in small-frame tai chi styles.



These techniques are not the least most used in hsing-I where they are structured mostly to the animal styles, such as bear and snake.



Vibrating Strikes


The name for vibration techniques is called “dou fin” in Chinese.



In ba gua the techniques require the entire chi of a person’s energy is made to vibrate, which allows the opening and closing actions of the body to oscillate at high speed.



This in turn creates a machine gun effect in which an attacker is struck with five or six full-power vibrating strikes in the blink of an eye similar to the chain pounding in Wing Tsun Kung Fu. These very powerful shaking techniques are especially useful for:



A) To hit from a distance of only one-half inch for shattering bone.

B) When fighting a close range, as when grabbed by a wrestler where there is no space to generate a strike.

C) To free yourself from joint-locks

D) If fighters have developed the iron shirt techniques in which they can bring about a layer of air, like a car tyre around their bodies, which acts like armour protecting their internal organs.

E) Using strikes sideways against boxers who can slip around a head punch

Martial artists who have mastered the iron shirt protective technique and boxers who can dodge the vulnerable parts of the body are in effect shielded. However vibrating strikes again these fighter types will take away their shield and the following strikes will do the damage.

The vibrating force originates in the tantien and can spread throughout your entire body at once (like a dog shaking water off its body) or you can focus the energy into any specific body point/s even the head and hips.



This is most often seen in the dragon styles of ba gua – this is a highly advanced technique but a vital one.



Don jin is also regularly used in hsing-I (especially the J chuan branch). As well as in chen and “old style” Yang tai chi chuan, although this may not be the case in the “new” styles developed from yang chen fu.



Condensation Strikes



With condensation strikes the aim of training this technique is to strike an opponent so that the energy emitted hits the target with a feeling of a heavy “thud” at a point deep within where the strike was delivered.



With such a skill and technique mastered one could break, say the fifth brick, in a stack of fifteen.



If you train this technique on a sand bag (not recommended in ba gua if you wish to train your internal chi energy to the maximum possible extent) then your power will be focused to the centre of the sand bag, however you should find the bag will not move at all.



These techniques can be used to attack internal organs of an attacker’s body and their brain. This is an earlier level of cotton palm and is often referred to as the interal martial art that is as equal as Shaolin’s “Iron Palm”.



This technique exists in all three styles, equally trained with open hands, fists or forearms.



“Cotton Palm” Strikes



The cotton palm strikes are soft strikes which focus on strength and piercing power of your inner chi energy.



These strikes should be used with the same physical force that you would stroke an animal – such as a kitten or a puppy so they are very gentle. The piercing of your chi can cause your opponent mild discomfort, with severe temporary pain with no after effects, internal bleeding or death.



This strike needs someone of extremely high level of knowledge and skill with excellent control of one’s chi.



“Cotton Palm” strikes are equally well known and most practiced with all the advanced levels of internal martial arts practitioners.



“Wave-Energy Strikes”



With wave-energy strikes they seemingly appear to be soft/powerless, this is because they focus on sending shock waves through an opponent. The energy of these strikes are similar to the energy found below the surface of large ocean waves, which is invisible from the surface of the ocean. These strikes feel very light and weightless. They are included in the advanced levels of all three internal martial arts.



Simultaneous Projection of Energy in Opposite Direction



You can learn to find your own energy within your body and project this through your hands to destroy attackers’ joints, break bones, crush internal organs of pierce the head with energy penetrating through the skull. This internal technique is incorporated into many movements in all three styles.

Told ya i been a busy girl with my research, im feeling much better now and thank you so much for all of your wonderful support wqhen i was going trhough my depressed state got run down with the flu but now im over it it made me realsie i shouldnt take my health for granted or let obstacles get the better of me emotionally, with all of your help im much stronger thank you all so very much especailly Thai Bri couldn't have got there without ya ((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((big HUGS)))))))))))))))))))))))))))))

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